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OUTSIDER
After finishing primary school at H. A. Jack, I started grade eight at Sandringham High
School. Even after apartheid, most black people still lived in the townships and the areas
formerly designated as homelands, where the only available government schools were the
broken remnants of the Bantu system. Wealthy white kids—along with the few black people
and colored people and Indians who had money or could get scholarships—were holed up in
private schools, which were super-expensive but virtually guaranteed entry into university.
Sandringham was what we call a Model C school, which meant it was a mix of government
and private, similar to charter schools in America. The place was huge, a thousand kids on
sprawling grounds with tennis courts, sports fields, and a swimming pool.
Being a Model C school and not a government school, Sandringham drew kids from all
over, making it a near-perfect microcosm of post-apartheid South Africa as a whole—a perfect
example of what South Africa has the potential to be. We had rich white kids, a bunch of
middle-class white kids, and some working-class white kids. We had black kids who were
newly rich, black kids who were middle-class, and black kids from the townships. We had
colored kids and Indian kids, and even a handful of Chinese kids, too. The pupils were as
integrated as they could be given that apartheid had just ended. At H. A. Jack, race was
broken up into blocks. Sandringham was more like a spectrum.
South African schools don’t have cafeterias. At Sandringham we’d buy our lunch at what
we call the tuck shop, a little canteen, and then have free rein to go wherever we wanted on
the school grounds to eat—the quad, the courtyard, the playground, wherever. Kids would
break off and cluster into their cliques and groups. People were still grouped by color in most
cases, but you could see how they all blended and shaded into one another. The kids who
played soccer were mostly black. The kids who played tennis were mostly white. The kids who
played cricket were a mix. The Chinese kids would hang out next to the prefab buildings. The
matrics, what South Africans call seniors, would hang out on the quad. The popular, pretty
girls would hang out over here, and computer geeks would hang out over there. To the extent
that the groupings were racial, it was because of the ways race overlapped class and
geography out in the real world. Suburban kids hung out with suburban kids. Township kids
hung out with township kids.
At break, as the only mixed kid out of a thousand, I faced the same predicament I had on
the playground at H. A. Jack: Where was I supposed to go? Even with so many different